Onnita Crissmon recalled her wakeup call as, "Like a bomb, a bam, something."
Crissmon rose much earlier than she intended. She thought the sound that woke her was a tornado.
"Just terrifying to me because I could've lost my life right here," she said.
Crissmon and her son Jeremiah were sleeping when around 2:15am when a car crashed right into their apartment.
"I was trying to go see my son and the dressers were blocked, because when it hit it pushed everything that way," Crissmon said.
Police say the man who drove into Crissmon's apartment had been shot. The violent chain of events apparently started when three men met a couple of women at a club. The three victims agreed to go with the women to the apartment complex, where they were robbed at gunpoint by two men.
The suspects took the victims' cell phone and wallets. When the driver tried to flee, the robbers shot him in the neck. He smashed into two cars before crashing into the apartment.
The victims tell police they believe they were set up by the women, who left the scene and haven't been seen or heard from since.
"I've been here 10 years and that wasn't no shock to me," said resident Jimmy Sanders. "It's sad to say that, but it wasn't a shock."
Folks who've lived here a while say violent crime is rampant. Our exclusive Crime Tracker shows between January and March of this year, one robbery and two aggravated assaults were reported on this street. Still, many tell us a lot of the crime, including drugs and prostitution, go unreported.
Neighbor Samantha Jenkins said, "That's terrible to know that you have that kind of stuff going on in your neighborhood."
The gunman in this case got away. The man who was shot is expected to survive. He's listed as stable at Ben Taub Hospital.
But one who won't soon escape from the nightmare that woke her is Onnita Crissmon.
She said, "I thank God he wasn't over a little bit more, or we wouldn't have made it out up out of there."
Police are still searching for the gunmen. If you have any information, you're asked to call Crime Stoppers.
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